An old technique is making its way into contemporary kitchens. It’s called sonker and the purpose of this centuries-old dish was to preserve leftover harvests. Savvy southern cooks and chefs are using this biscuit — or dumpling, depending on your perspective — concoction as a cupboard-clearing, cost-saving, creative solution, including it on specials and by request from regular diners.

Tucked away in the mist and mystery of Northwestern North Carolina, we can thank settlers of the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountain Range for sonker (although the origins are supposedly derived from a Scottish term that means ‘a little of this or that’). The story of how it came to be varies wildly from home cooks to historians. Little written history exists about the evolution of sonker, which is not to be confused with its doughy cousins, cobbler, and pie. Instead, great-grandmothers more commonly passed down the recipes to younger family members verbally. During hard times, sonker came in especially handy, with cooks making quick work of ingredients before they could spoil. Back then, with many hungry mouths to feed amid the backbreaking job of farming, nary a crumb went to waste. It’s said that first lady Martha Washington included a recipe for sonker in her cookbook.

While the dish with the funny name has always been a mainstay of local lore, in these modern times, when hot trends from nose-to-tail butchery to spinning beet greens as the leafy green du jour, reducing waste, and lowering food costs is neverending, the tradition of sonker is finding new life among a younger generation of chefs. The latest progression in crafting sonker involves using what’s on hand and honoring local cuisine. In coastal regions, this might include a seafood sonker, while in the flyover states, chefs could hone in on a farm-fresh vegetable sonker.

In the heart of the Yadkin Valley Vinicultural Region, chefs at Dobson-based Harvest Grill at Shelton Vineyards have figured out how to combine vintages from their winery with local fruit to create new versions of old-time sonker to use what’s in the cabinet and honor the locals who have helped preserve the original recipes. “It always makes me a little uncomfortable to have to throw something away,” said chef Paul S. Lange. “Making a sonker is a great way to use everything in your kitchen, especially being out in the country, where we want every dollar to find its way onto the table to create the best experience for our guests.”

Harvest Grill pastry chef Frances Draughn knows a little something about Southern cooking. Making the restaurant’s latest sonker dishes took her back to her childhood sitting in her grandmother’s kitchen, playing in the corn crib and being scared to go in the smokehouse. Chefs Lange and Draughn created two variations, the first a departure from classic berry in a poached pear, wine-soaked sonker using their Shelton Vineyards Port. They added golden raisins, plumped up in the brown sugar and spices gravy. Next, they prepared a blackberry sonker in a large cast iron pan, letting the heady fruit stew into a thick syrup to keep the dough from becoming soggy.

Lange and Draughn recently invited historian Marion Venable and sonker expert Emma Jean Tucker to sample the sonkers they made. The ladies say they still smile thinking of rushing home to the scent of apple or strawberry sonker wafting from the family kitchen decades ago. “We lived on a farm and had our own garden and fruit trees, so my mamma put whatever kind fruit we harvested at the time in her sonker, which was black raspberry or even huckleberry sonker, sweetened with sorghum, cane molasses or sugar,” said Tucker.

In a nod to what contemporary chefs might consider as a garnish, Marion Venable’s grandmother made sonker with leftover dough to bake on its own for after school snacks. Along with the sonker itself, their elder relatives would make a dip of sorts out of cream, sugar, molasses, and vanilla extract to pour over it. “We often used sweet potatoes, aplenty from root cellars where they remained accessible all year long and the dip kept it from drying out,” said Venable, who helps organize the Surry County Historical Society sonker festival every October in Mount Airy — otherwise known as Mayberry because it is Andy Griffith’s hometown. Unofficially, sweet potato remains the most popular version of sonker in Surry County.

Tucker and Venable welcome chefs to contact them for copies of the Surry County Historical Society’s 28-page sonker cookbook, hoping the nearly 40-year-old publication will inspire new recipes and keep the cuisine alive. It’s already happening with a spate of seed-to-fork gastronomes who relish pushing sonker’s sweet boundaries.

Classic sonker recipes chronicled in Surry County Historical Society cookbook often include personal stories of what the dish meant to the cooks who made it and how they preferred it prepared. Bettie Hardy of the Siloam Extension Club created her ‘Old Timey Sonker’ recipe, in which she tells of using a “good sized sonker pan” and handfuls of flour rather – she developed it before she ever had measuring cups. Lena Mae Inman’s Lazy Day Sonker has just five ingredients but it would feed a family of six. Heath Hendren Clark credits the Depression for the invention of his ‘Mother’s Berry Sonker’ recipe featuring leftover biscuits and berries. Contemporary chefs will better recognize the main ingredients in ‘Pie Plant Sonker’ as rhubarb. And Wavy Mabry shares the story of racing home after school for a helping of ‘Spread Apple Pie’ dripping with melted butter or sourwood honey.

Sonker master Loretta Flack elevates the humble sonker to gourmet heights at her utterly charming Roxxi & Lulu’s in historic Elkin. Hers is a dumpling-style sonker (pictured above), which is slightly different from the biscuit-based version. “The dumplings are not overly sweet, so depending on how sweet the fruit is on its own, I usually add about two cups of sugar to the water and fruit and boil for around eight minutes,” said Flack, who cautions new sonker chefs not to stir dumplings after dropping them in the water. “Then I set them aside for about ten minutes to completely steam them – the result being a really soft dumpling that’s dry on the inside, just like the inside of a biscuit – but when the butter in those dumplings bursts, they just melt in your mouth.” [Read more…]

Online presence is increasingly crucial in today’s tech-driven world, especially for restaurants. Gone are the days when paper menus handed out upon a guest’s arrival would suffice. Today, people are searching for places to eat and certain menu items before even leaving their couch! These researchers want accurate, detailed information at their fingertips immediately.

With SinglePlatform, you can get your restaurant menu online across an expansive publisher network including reputable sites like Google, Yelp, TripAdvisor, Facebook, and Yahoo. Why does this matter? It’s simple — you need to be in the places that people are searching if you want to attract new customers! These search sites are the top places where people are conducting their online research, and SinglePlatform gets your business information in front of them!

Don’t just take our* word for the importance of online menu presence, though. An OpenTable survey concluded that 93% of people view menus online prior to dining out. Beyond that, 49% of people perform local searches without a specific place in mind (BrandRep)! Diners are looking for new places to enjoy a meal and you want to appear in their search queries if you have the potential to be that “Italian restaurant near me” they’re looking for.

Speaking of menus, holidays are special occasions that inspire people to dine out more than usual. People are exploring menu options and making reservations ahead of time when it comes to these celebratory events. Luckily, SinglePlatform has data and insights into the restaurant industry. We explored menu view data for the year 2017 and discovered some very interesting results that we wanted to share with you.

According to SinglePlatform data, the most popular holiday for viewing menus online in 2017 was Mother’s Day, with 2,375,595 views on that day alone! The other top two days for views were the day before and two days before Mother’s Day (the three days totaled over 7.3 million menu views). This goes to show that the holiday is extremely popular for dining out and that people are most likely also making reservations days ahead of time. As a restaurateur, what can this insight do for you? The answer is a lot (and we’ll explain).

Marketing Made Easy

Now that you know Mother’s Day is popular among crowds, get a head start on marketing around it! Build marketing campaigns and promote the event on social media to excite customers about bringing mom to your restaurant. You can even offer exclusive incentives, pre-fixe menus, and other specials to sweeten the deal. Since Mother’s Day always falls on Sunday, people are probably looking for brunch and lunch options. If you’re holding a special brunch event or dinner deal, make sure you let potential customers know well in advance.[Read more…]

What if you as a restaurant owner or chef could find every lost dollar? What if you could clearly see which initiatives earn revenue and which are costing you diners? What if you could be recognized as a leader in your region, state, or even nationwide for your commitment to good food?

The Good Food 100 Restaurants movement is making this possible while rewarding restaurants for the good work they do in the kitchen and elsewhere. The mission of Good Food 100 is about promoting the people who are changing the food industry for the better as well as growing a community and the number of eaters who care about the power of good food, according to Good Food 100’s co-founder and president Sara Brito. The leaders of smart eateries like Tender Greens, The Market Place, XOCO, Miller Union, and dozens more participating in the Good Food 100 list already know this is where the food industry is headed – and why it is happy news for anyone in the business. Nearly 80 percent of diners surveyed in multiple studies report their desire not just to understand what they are eating but also where it comes from and the impact their restaurant choices have on their environment.

Brito’s venture, the Good Food Media Network is a nonprofit educational organization that produces and publishes the Good Food 100 Restaurants. Having been in the food industry for 20 years, her unique perspective includes an eagle eye on the evolution of the restaurant business. She co-created and launched the Slow Food ‘Snail of Approval’ designation given to restaurants, bars, food, and beverage artisans contributing quality, authenticity, and sustainability of the food supply of the City of New York among numerous other achievements. Here, Brito shares why the Good Food 100 listing matters and why you should apply to be on it.

What are the benefits to restaurants and diners?

If you’re proud of your food purchasing practices, you owe it to yourself, your staff, and your guests to apply to the Good Food 100 Restaurants. It is not easy to run a restaurant these days with so many challenges in staffing and labor issues as well as rising rents and managing food costs. Restaurants don’t get the credit they deserve and the media focuses on hot topic of the moments. Now that farm-to-table has moved into the mainstream, they will move on from that. Someone has to help tell the story of what these chefs are doing right on an ongoing basis.

How did this idea spring to life?

I really wanted to bring to light that good food is the right thing to do — making a moral and ethical case for it. But more than that, to bring the language that businesses speak and elected officials listen to. We help chefs tell their powerful stories about what their impact is in aggregate. In the culinary world, chefs and restaurants have to wait to be bestowed honors – wait to be named best new chef, wait to get named best new restaurant – while the Good Food 100 is putting the power back in the hands of the people who create the dishes.

Why do the Good Food 100 ratings matter and how do the economics factor into the mix?

Eaters are using lists in all forms to curate the proliferation of choices they have in where to eat. Even someone like me who works in the industry can’t keep up with all the restaurants opening, and more and more diners want to make choices based on their values. Lists that only focus on food service, ambience, or taste service, while once historically valued, are not enough anymore. We are making it easier for diners to make eating choices based on their values. Plus, many restaurants don’t even realize the good work they are doing. The 90 restaurants who applied last year generated about $61.8 million, but those dollars had an almost $199.9 million impact. So what that means, is, every dollar diners spent on good food had an almost $3 impact.

Beyond recognition, why is the Good Food 100 an important part of changing the industry for the better?

Chefs can be rock stars one day and a bad news story the next. It is so easy to fall from grace. And these days, the bad news story that brings you down could be a single tweet. Chefs and restaurants can wait until transparency is forced on them and react to it, or they can be proactive and be real leaders in moving the industry to a better place. In the future, we hope to create an annual summit of chefs gathering together with seminars and workshops grounded in the data to facilitate sharing insights and advice. [Read more…]

This feature is part of a regular series called “How I Got Promoted,” spotlighting the stories of how top hospitality professionals took their careers to the next level. Today, we hear from Mario Castro, lead bartender of New York’s most exciting new cocktail bar, Gibson & Luce, on how he rebuilt his network in a new city and leveraged that to grow his career.

I’m originally from southern California, and I lived in San Francisco for about 12 years. The west coast is what I know. I launched my cooking career as a line cook at a restaurant called Butterfly on the Embarcadero. I needed to make a little more money so I talked to the chef, who pushed me toward bartending. He knew I was good at talking to people (we had an open kitchen), and so he told me I could pick up extra shifts at the bar. He was right: I loved it.

From there, I went to a restaurant called Prospect, and that’s where I really got the chance to explore bartending, give classes, and take control of my career. I found mentors who gave me books to read and taught me techniques I had never used before — making syrups, clarifying, utilizing only the best products, how to never waste anything. They taught me how to really raise the level on classic drinks. Soon, all that learning paid off, and I got promoted to bar manager.

While I was living in California, I would visit New York every once in a while and I always thought, Man, this is a beautiful place. I love the people here, and I love the feeling here. Back in San Francisco, the culture was changing because of the tech industry — the city didn’t feel the same as it used to. And I figured that New York was probably one of the best places to make a name for yourself as a bartender. So I moved there.

The biggest difference between here and California, I quickly discovered, is that in California, I had been around for so long that I had a lot of friends. Here, I only knew a few people. I started going to bar, and just chatting with the bartender — I’d eat, observe, ask where he or she was from. I am usually pretty open with people, and I’ve always thought the bar was a more personal experience — that’s the reason I love bartending so much. Between those meetings and the few friends I knew who worked at places like The Four Horsemen and Torst, I started handing out my resume and getting interviews at places.

A challenge, coming from San Francisco, is that people didn’t always recognize the places where I worked. If I told anyone back home that I worked at Prospect, they would have been like, “Hell yeah!” but here, people hadn’t really heard of those places.

But I managed to get a meeting with Henry at Life Hotel — they told me they were opening up a speakeasy called Gibson & Luce, that it would be a big part of the restaurant but also very independent, and a cocktail spot first and foremost. I think they saw in me my versatility as a professional — I had been a special education teacher’s assistant, so I was very patient. I had worked in retail for Apple, so I knew how to handle myself in a fast-paced environment. I love history and literature and I have always taken pride in being knowledgeable about the cocktail practice. But more than anything, they realized that I really love bartending. I have a passion for this. I have family back in Mexico who own bars — this is what I want to do. I even hope to open my own place, eventually. [Read more…]

Running a restaurant is, without a doubt, one of the most challenging, passion-driven things you can do—and then there’s marketing one. Keeping your business thriving, and serving up hospitality to each and every guest, night after night, is an enormous undertaking, so the unfortunate reality is that many restaurateurs don’t have the time or resources to market their restaurants effectively. Many restaurateurs also believe that diners begin their search with their restaurant in mind (having heard about it from a friend or family member, on Eater, or through a local list.) Next step is for them to choose to book and arrive on your doorstep. Sounds simple, right?

Unfortunately, it’s not. While this path of discovery is certainly one way diners find and book your restaurant, it really isn’t the most common way. Organic search for your website is one of many important marketing channels—and that’s where we come in.

As the leader of our marketing team here at OpenTable, I consistently get asked: “How exactly are you marketing my restaurant?” and “Where do OpenTable diners come from?” — and “How many diners come from search engines?”

Think of OpenTable as your ultimate marketing engine. With more than 30 employees focused on marketing to diners, we have built highly optimized, online marketing programs to find and encourage diners to visit your restaurants. Beginning with our website and mobile apps, and on down to paid ads, we have fine-tuned and tailored our strategies to identify, market to, and help bring you the diners who are most likely to be your future guests.

In order to answer these important questions, let’s take a look at the data. Below is a snapshot of the marketing channels that drove all OpenTable diners seated at U.S. restaurants through OpenTable in 2017.

As the data demonstrates, half of our diners come directly to OpenTable.com and our mobile apps. If your restaurant does not appear on our platforms, you may be missing out on capturing that audience. About a quarter of guests come directly from your websites, and restaurant brand equity is an important search driver (as alluded to above. ) The remaining nearly 25% are driven exclusively by our marketing engine.